The Touchstone Trilogy (105 page)

Fake-Mum, after a moment's shock, thought that was really interesting – which kind of says everything about my family – and then asked me why one of my eyes was a different colour.  Jules was busy ogling Kaoren and telling him to make the cool sword come out of his arm again, a demand which Kaoren's Symbol Sight didn't seem equal to translating, so I told Jules I could do that too and made a spike for him, but then introduced Kaoren to fake-Mum and explained that we were engaged and getting married in about a year and a half and that I would try to visit properly but didn't know if it would be possible.

Mum's reaction made me laugh, and I told Kaoren: "Mum says that if she was real she would congratulate us and welcome you to the family, but thinks that should be saved for when she really gets to see me again and instead will give you several pointed hints about find a way for me to visit Earth."  Kaoren said he'd try, and then gave me a warning about my energy use, but I gave myself a free extension by expanding my senses – finding it marvellously easy.  It made me feel a lot less like passing out, but also infinitely less focused.

I told fake-Mum I didn't have a lot of time, but had a bunch of questions.  First, how did I go with my exams?  [So irrelevant to me now, but I'd
studied
for them!]  She didn't know – she hadn't opened the letter, but sent Jules to get it for me.  Second, what did 'aether' and 'touchstone' mean on Earth?  Fake-Mum more or less knew the answers, but since she had her laptop, she googled the words for me.  It's so weird that she was able to do it, and it really hit me in terms of energy cost, but now I know that a touchstone was a piece of rock used to test the quality of metal, which doesn't match me at all, and that aether meant pretty much what I thought it meant.  Next thing I wanted to know was how everyone in the family was.  Mum said that Nick had gotten into the uni he wanted, and that I'd missed the Olympics.  I was just going to ask what had been happening in my favourite shows and webcomics when a weirdness in my peripheral vision distracted me – and when I turned my head to focus on it properly it distracted me so completely that I dropped the visualisation altogether, fake-Mum and fake-Jules and fake-home fading away in a few seconds.

Kaoren moved forward, concerned, as I turned my head again to see whether my distraction would keep happening, and then I said "Streaming visual," and tried to show them what I was seeing.

There was this whole other world lurking out of the corner of my eye.  If I kept up my expanded senses, and moved my head sharply, for a moment I could see it overlaid over Muina's near-space.  And yet, it was Muina, just a different version of it.  The old town was still there, sprawled along the lake bank to the north, except much larger and grander and not ruined at all, and with this huge beam of light shooting up into the sky from where the amphitheatre is.  And big statues of people, including one out in the lake with some kind of temple built around it, and these incredible crystal structures which were glowing with the last vestiges of sunset.  No hint at all of Pandora, whose buildings are already well-formed in the area's near-space.  It was coming up to night-time in the other world, and lots of the windows were lit, and it looked very sumptuous and busy.  We seemed to be sitting just outside one of the buildings, and I had a vague glimpse of a person just to my right walking into the building.  Just an ordinary-looking person, dressed a bit like the Nurans.

I'm seriously glad that the interface was able to transmit what I was seeing, because I must have looked particularly weird getting all fascinated with my peripheral vision.  The Nurans had to wait until we were back in real-space to be shown what I was seeing.

It was really really tiring trying to look at it, though, especially coming on top of my Earth visualisation, and I could only manage a half-dozen side-swiped glimpses before I started feeling grey and ill and Tsur Selkie ordered me to stop.  And of course going back into real-space made my vision go totally nuts from blurriness.  I've learned from past mistakes, though and kept my eyes shut, risking only the briefest squint.  The headache from that was enough to send me to the infirmary for the rest of the day.  I gather that they were worried that my interface was going to start growing again, because it was giving the equivalent of 'feedback'.

It's taken two days for my eyesight to stop being blurry, which has meant two days of being blindfolded.  That's not as impossibly inconvenient as it sounds, since they gave me a little portable scanner which I could wear like sunglasses to use to see instead.  Totally weird seeing the world that way, because all the colours and my depth perception were ever so slightly different.  It exacerbated my ever-present blurriness headache to use it for more than a couple of minutes, but at least it meant I could get to the bathroom.

Sen had a wonderful time playing ministering angel while I lay about feeling rotten and reading.  It's a little harder to tell what Ys and Rye made of it all, but they seemed to be in the background a lot making sure that Sen's attempts to nurse me didn't end up with me having mugs of juice tipped on my head.

I'm feeling a lot better today.  The headache only properly went away when the blurriness did.  They haven't even begun to decide what, if anything, my peripheral world means and what they might want to do about it.

Aspiration

Kaoren seems to have cast a spell on the kids while I wasn't paying attention.  We went down to have lunch on the common room patio to celebrate me being able to see normally again, and while Ys and Rye are still all quiet and wary, they constantly look at Kaoren to check his reaction to everything.  The rest of Fourth, who were the only ones about for lunch, watched with intense amusement and Mori told me later that it was only to be expected.

Mori and the rest of Fourth Squad are only just beginning to relax with me again.  They never reacted really negatively, but for a long while stopped gossiping and sending me comments over the interface.  There'll always be a level of constraint, though, I think, but as much because of my increasingly weird position of touchstone as because of the idea of "Tsee Ruuel + snuggles".

Of course, Mori has an added level of complexity since she's sleeping with the captain of Eighth Squad, who seems to be Kaoren's closest friend.  Mori was more than cheerful when Eighth (and Seventh and Squad Two from Kolar) arrived today, but from my point of view it wasn't good timing.  Exhaustion, headaches and children have meant a relatively chaste engagement, and I'm not in the mood to watch Forel purring over Kaoren.  Even though I know he doesn't want her to, I still can't stand it when she puts her hands on him – while congratulating him on our engagement, no less.

I'm so going to ravish Kaoren when he gets back from his training run.

Kaoren's given Ys and Rye a schedule of things they have to do other than lessons, and also set achievement expectations for their spelling tests.  I think that might be what won them over.  Not only allowing them to learn to read, and taking an interest, but requiring they do it well.

Going to ravish him a lot.

Stories

Kaoren ended up having to go off to a Captain's meeting, and came back really tired and not a candidate for ravishment.  I'd spotted the meeting being added (I've learned to keep an eye on his calendar), and so I managed to shrug off being disappointed about it.  I don't want our relationship to always be him supporting me and never the other way around, so I just gave him a foot rub and wasn't surprised when he fell asleep almost immediately.  He spent a lot of time with me when I was all headachy and trying to sleep, and so got to be headachy and unable to sleep as well.  Except he didn't get to spend all day in bed to make up for it.  I'm going to have to revive the sleeping on the couch discussion.

I distracted myself waiting for him to come back by asking Mara for some recommendations for children's books, and browsing through them to pick one to read.  Kaoren had also set bedtimes for the kids, and to reinforce that with Sen (who is very difficult to keep in bed) I decided story time would be a good addition to the routine.  I think that worked well, particularly since Ys and Rye could treat it as a continuation of their lessons.  Not a bad story, either – it's called
Caves of Nonora
, and is  set back in the underground era on Tare, where a bunch of kids finds a huge hidden kingdom of blue people beneath their island.  A chapter conveniently seems to be Sen's staying-awake limit, putting her to sleep nicely, while Ys and Rye were totally fixated.

I've spent my whole life reading books.  I vaguely remember Mum reading to me in our own bedtime sessions, and our house is practically a library.  The way I think, the way I act, most of that's because of the books I've read. 
Caves of Nonora
is Ys, Rye and Sen's first book and my voice was a little shaky reading it because I kept thinking about that, and about all the books which were important to me that I don't have to read to them.

The talent school building is at habitable stage, and they're going to move in children they've identified tomorrow morning, then hold an orientation session in the afternoon.  It's not going to be anything like so controlled an environment as the Setari school – the idea is not to turn them into Setari, it's to make sure they have enough control of their talents to not accidentally set buildings alight – and if they have family their family will be living with them.  The school will be connected to the Setari building through the medical section and kitchens, and is set further back from the lake, with its balconies looking mostly toward Pandora.

Since almost all of the Nurans have refused the interface, school is going to be a major part of Pandora for a while.  KOTIS Command is hoping that eventually Tsana Dura and Tsana Ridel can take over, but until then it's going to have to be face-to-face classes, which will take up a lot of resources.

I'm worried about the school, unsure how Ys and Rye will be received.  At least, because they're using the interface, Ys, Rye and Sen will attend only the physical and psychic classes, and will simply be supervised during the day while they do interface lessons.

Saturday, August 30

Away team

Fourth and Seventh were assigned to go Cruzatch-hunting in the Ena today.  They started fairly late, well after lunch, but still aren't back.  I was trying not to be fretty about it, but knew they were officially overdue when Lohn and Mara showed up to sit with me.  It was nice to see Mara out of medical, and I talked to them for a while, but I was just fretting too much and asked if they minded hanging about while I wrote.  They're watching a movie.

I'm climbing the walls, of course.  Fortunately I didn't start to get really worried until after story time was over – there's no way I could hide the way I'm feeling from Sen.  Ys and Rye are awake, but snug in bed lost in their virtual classroom.

This has been a day which began well, but slowly went downhill.  Kaoren and I started out very happily making up for lost time, then having a fairly unresolved discussion on what to do when I'm sick to prevent him from having to suffer along with me.  Neither of us wants to sleep in separate beds, but Kaoren said he'd think about a row of pillows in between us.

During the morning we had technicians in to reshape the kids' apartment so there's three largish single beds and a bit more privacy for them, but keeping them still in the one room.  It cost them a chunk of their lounge room, but I think it works out well this way.  It was a bit hard to gauge Ys and Rye's opinion of the changes, but Sen remains unreservedly positive about almost everything which we do.

This afternoon, though, after Kaoren had gone on his mission and we headed over to the talent school, Sen stopped being her usual chirrupy self.  The identified children and their families had been brought over just after lunch and moved their sparse collection of belongings into their assigned rooms – the school apartments are similar to the Setari apartments, but with two or three bedrooms each.  Then everyone gathered into a small lecture room, filling the rows of scoopy whitestone benches.  There were more Nurans than I was expecting, about forty in all, a couple of them adults.

Nils, bruises fading, was playing my escort.  I'm not altogether sure if I'm required to have a guard even in the talent school, or if he just tagged along out of curiosity.  He seems to find the kids endlessly entertaining.

When we walked into the room there was a little flutter of suppressed reaction, but that was nothing to do with Ys, Sen or Rye and all about what I've started to think of as The Nils Effect.  The squads are relatively used to him, but anywhere Nils goes – among civilians or KOTIS staff who don't see him day to day – The Nils Effect produces a mass wave of Profound Awareness of Nils.  Even wrapped up in Kaoren as I am, there were a few times today when my heart suddenly started racing because Nils had leaned forward, or brushed my arm, or done entirely innocuous things which triggered PAoN.

The pinksuit in charge of the school handled her PAoN very well – glancing at us as we came in, going an interesting shade of purple, then carrying on as if Nils wasn't in the room.  Except purple.  We sat up back, with Ys and Rye between us and Sen between them, and all three were quiet and tense, not even paying attention to Ghost, curled in Nils' lap.

One of the Nuran Setari, a man called Serray, spoke first – all in Nuran, which I struggled to follow.  But he was just explaining how this residence was different, that the primary focus was one of controlling their stronger talents.  Some of the older children might already have received training within their houses ('house' seems to have been the major social structure on Nuri), but they would be given a review and further training to verify they had full control of their abilities.  They weren't being trained to be Setari, but skilled talents would be useful in many aspects of Muina's development.  Those family members who were here who did not have strong talents would also be offered talent training, if they so chose.  All at the talent school, as with the rest of Nuri's survivors, would be receiving language and skills training, to allow them to find a role in Muina's settlement.